How could you do this to AST?

[Liam_Harper]

I don't mind Noct going if it needs to, but I'm very disappointed they took the non-existent "shield/direct" healer divide to build on instead of working on individual class playstyle. Shield or Direct is not a playstyle, it's a piece of a toolkit. There's no rotation or core class mechanics to build around. Your heals simply have a shield attached, a HoT or more heal.

The only thing this serves to do is potentially force healer comps. Especially if shields don't stack and we end up with Savage fights on a difficulty of e11s cycles or e12s, you don't want to bring WHM/AST or SCH/SAG. There's also the consideration of whether they fail to address WHM's mobility, making AST straight up better to fit that pure role. We'll have to see how it plays out, but there are a lot of potential problems and once they release an expansion they tend not to address them until the next one.

It does yet again confirm the devs don't know what they're doing. There are still no mentions of engaging dps, building on class gameplay, better pets or card systems, fixing core issues like clipping or ghosting, or expanding the toolkit. In fact a shield/pure divide could easily mean pruning the toolkit as they trim away anything that doesn't fit the intended category.

As I said above, but you seemed to ignore: No one is saying that Noct AST is weak—they are saying that it is not as valuable or as efficient as Diurnal. Standard healer comps are still WHM/SCH or DiAST/SCH. While WHM/Noct AST exists, it is most certainly not the norm or the meta.

WHM/SCH is not really a typical meta comp. With no AST, someone has to bite the bullet and heal and that means dps tax. It exists and works fine but it's slightly less optimal than Noct/WHM.
Generally for midcore/hardcore it's SCH/DirAST, WHM/DirAST or WHM/Noct (depending if you need shields). Basically AST + Other. Casual doesn't matter because people just healbot.